When Frederick Douglass' slave mistress began teaching him to read, she changed Douglass' life. When the slave master forced her to stop those lessons, he changed history.
That was the moment the young Douglass discovered just how threatening an educated Black man could be to the white status quo. If words were that dangerous, Douglass figured, they must also be pretty powerful.
The man who became the country's most famous anti-slavery activist spent the rest of his life proving just how right that young slave was.
Douglass' world-changing way with words is the subject of "Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches," a new HBO documentary that tells the story of Douglass' astounding life and historical impact through five of his most important speeches.
As performed by actors Denzel Whitaker ("Black Panther"), Jonathan Majors ("Lovecraft Country"), Nicole Beharie ("42"), Colman Domingo ("Euphoria") and Jeffrey Wright ("Westworld"), the speech excerpts trace Douglass' growth from his beginnings as the star speaker on the abolitionist circuit to the revered elder statesman who had the ear of the whole nation.
In between, Douglass confronted the great sins of slavery and racism with speeches that changed the way the world saw Black people and the way Black people saw themselves. It was a huge weight for one man to carry, but as "Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches" shows, Douglass had the intellect, the soul and the ego to take it all on.
"It did not entirely satisfy me to narrate the wrongs," says actor André Holland ("Passing"), reading from Douglass' autobiography. "I felt like denouncing them."
Inspired by historian David W. Blight's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, "Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom," and executive produced by scholar and author Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ("The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song"), the documentary packs a tremendous amount of vibrant life and wrenching history into its 58 minutes.
In addition to the speech excerpts, director Julia Marchesi (the inventive "Mae West: Dirty Blonde") weaves interviews with experts (including the insanely quotable Blight and Gates), Holland's autobiographical readings, and period-setting photographs and other visuals into a film that is rich with information and emotion. It may have the educational chops of a lecture, but it resonates like a great conversation.
It helps that the subject is a man whose astonishing life and towering gifts seem almost supernatural somehow — in no small part because they needed to be.
"Imagine that you had to dispel doubts about your humanity every time you took to the stage. Imagine having to fight to show that you were as complicated a human being as any who walked the face of the earth," Gates says.
"He was the most famous Black man in the world in the 19th century, and he achieved that position by one means — his voice."
Born into slavery in Maryland around 1818, Douglass spent his early years working on a plantation. The trajectory of his life changed when he was sent to live in Baltimore as a house slave. His mistress didn't know it was illegal to educate slaves, so she began teaching him to read.
The slave master put an end to that pretty quickly, but it didn't matter. Douglass continued to educate himself, giving food scraps to poor white children in exchange for any bit of knowledge they could share. By the time he turned 18, Douglass was reading about the abolitionist movement and planning his escape.
In 1838, wearing a bogus sailor uniform and carrying faked papers declaring him a free man, he boarded a train for a journey that would eventually lead him to New Bedford, Massachusetts. He gave his first public speech three years later, at an anti-slavery convention in Nantucket, Massachusetts.
That speech, "I Have Come to Tell You Something About Slavery," is the first of the five featured in the documentary. As performed by Whitaker, the speech shows us a young man who is not afraid to speak boldly and honestly about his life as a slave and the scars it leaves behind.
Like his fellow "Five Speeches" actors, Whitaker is dressed in low-key street clothes and speaks directly into the camera. And like Douglass himself, all five actors are casual and confrontational. Also fierce, fearful, bemused and bruising. The speech excerpts are short, but they deliver a powerful gut punch.
In a rare misstep, the documentary also includes post-speech interviews with the actors. Their sound bites are fine, but they are no match for the power of Douglass' words or the strength of the actors' poetic and potent performances.
"Put away your prejudice. Banish the idea that one class must rule over another," the quietly outraged Wright says in Douglass' "Lessons of the Hour" speech from 1894, given just one year before his death.
"Recognize the fact that the rights of the humblest citizen are as worthy of protection as are those of the highest, and your problems will be solved."
One of the most astonishing things about Douglass' speeches is that they sound like they could have been written today. And as "Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches" reminds us many times over, the tragedy is that we need them now as much as we did then.
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"Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches" is currently airing on multiple HBO channels and on HBO on Demand.
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